Digital Tracking Devices Coming Soon

Imagine walking by a Starbucks in an unfamiliar
city. Your cell phone rings, and a coupon for coffee pops up on its
screen, good only at that location.

How did your phone know you were even near that particular
Starbucks? What else does it know about you?

Enter location tracking, coming to a mobile device near you.
Features that one day can pinpoint your whereabouts to within the
length of a football field raise enormous privacy concerns, but
they also offer enormous benefits.

The challenge will be determining where to draw the line.

Digital Angel

Consider a technology to be unveiled today. Called Digital
Angel, a microchip worn close to the body promises to record a
person’s biological parameters and send distress signals during
medical emergencies.

But misused, these types of capabilities could amount to virtual
stalking.

Cell phones, handheld devices, even car navigation systems will
soon have detailed tracking abilities, if they do not already.
Services could begin appearing within a year or so.

Much of the drive will come from a federal law that requires
cell phones to identify callers’ locations to speed 911 emergency
responses. If the industry has to install expensive equipment
anyway, why not use it also to make money?

“There’s going to be a dramatic increase in the amount of
tracking that’s made possible, in part by services they don’t know
they have,” said Daniel J. Weitzner of the World Wide Web
Consortium, which sets technical standards for the Web.

Such tracking will let someone visit a Web site and
automatically get weather, movie showings or neighborhood
restaurants, based on their current location. If they’re lost, they
will be able to ask for turn-by-turn directions. Those short of
cash can be pointed to the nearest bank machine.

Big Brother Always With Us?

But if the information is stored, location tracking could result
in a 24-hour-a-day record of a person’s whereabouts.

So what if a divorce lawyer wants to check if someone’s been
cheating, or if a social service agent wants to know how many times
a person has visited a candy store with his child?

“You have to ask, ‘Who gets how much information?“‘ said Jason
Catlett, chief executive of Junkbusters Corp., a non-profit privacy
monitoring group in Green Brook, N.J.

“Telephone records are routinely subpoenaed. They can be very
intrusive, but far more intrusive is a complete log of your
physical movement.”

But companies looking to gain business from location tracking
insist that the worst-case scenarios presented are impractical to
implement in reality.

“There’s no way a database is large enough or cost effective
for Starbucks to monitor everyone’s location on the offchance they
can acquire a customer,” said Jason Devitt, chief executive of
Vindigo, which offers 11 city guides through Palm organizers.

Lee Hancock, founder and chief executive of go2 Systems Inc.,
said any short-term gains from such tactics would be offset by
losses if they alienate customers.

Leading wireless and advertising companies agree that they must
tread carefully because mobile devices are inherently more personal
than desktop computers.

Slow Rollout

At DoubleClick Inc., whose ad-targeting system generated much of
the Net’s privacy complaints, officials won’t deliver
location-based ads right away. The company wants to develop privacy
standards first, using lessons from the desktop.

“We’ve all learned what to do and what not to do, and we can
port that over to the wireless market,” said Jamie Byrne,
strategic director for emerging platforms at DoubleClick.

Any such ads will likely target a metropolitan region, rather
than a city block, because audiences for block-by-block ads would
be too small, Byrne said. Ultimately, he said, such targeting will
help subsidize wireless services that customers want.

Jonathan Fox, director of business development at advertising
company Engage Inc., says location-based profiles would not carry
names and other personal information.

TRUSTe, which runs a seal-of-approval program for Internet
privacy policies, is looking to develop guidelines for mobile
applications. Details that remain to be worked out include how to
notify customers on a phone’s small screen.

“It’s more difficult to retrofit policies if you’re already
down the road,” said Robert Lewin, TRUSTe chief executive. “Here,
we have the opportunity to do it right the first time.”

In many ways, a person’s whereabouts are already being tracked.

Employee security cards record when people enter buildings.
Discount grocery programs track what people buy, where and when.
Electronic toll-payment systems know when someone traverses a
tunnel or bridge.

Location, Location, Location?

Current phones can pinpoint callers to a few miles by
determining the location of the cell tower used to handle the call.

Palm VII organizers use similar techniques to narrow a user to a
particular zip code, and an optional global-positioning receiver
can pinpoint that person even further.

Marketers can also get clues from the items people search for or
the sites they visit—a city guide, for instance, tells in what
city a person is likely located or where they plan to visit.

But for the most part, marketers have yet to take full advantage
of such knowledge, and consumers have yet to complain.